Tag Archives: Dickens

This summer is the 160th anniversary of a famous vacation: from June 11th to July 13th, 1857, Hans Christian Andersen sojourned with Charles Dickens and his family, at their home in Gad’s Hill.

Dickens’s biographers tend to treat Andersen’s visit as something of a farce. Andersen was initially supposed to stay about a week, but he stayed five. Dickens’s daughter Kate thought him a “bony bore,” and reports that after Andersen left, Dickens pinned a note above a mirror that read, “Hans Andersen slept in this room for five weeks — which seemed to the family AGES!” From the Dickensian perspective, a patient but exasperated family put up with their Danish visitor’s eccentricities and poor English.

Kate Perugini (nee Dickens), who called Andersen a “bony bore.”

I’m working on a book chapter about Andersen, and find myself returning to this anecdote from another perspective. In a short volume published a half-century ago and subtitled “a friendship and its dissolution,” Elias Bredsdorff reprints a portion of Andersen’s diary, as well as his and Dickens’s correspondence (both to each other and with others). Andersen in these documents comes across as enamored with Dickens, desirous to stay in his company, where he was initially welcomed. He gradually became aware of the family’s annoyance, but only later; the first part of his visit went smoothly. Moreover, it was Dickens who, about ten days into Andersen’s visit, encouraged him to stay longer to see him perform in The Frozen Deep, a stage production to benefit the family of his friend Douglass Jerrold.

Andersen in 1846, just before his first visit to England.

Dickens and Andersen got along well the first time they met, in June 1847. Dickens had rented out his London house and was staying the summer in Kent, but traveled to London to attend a party at Lady Blessington’s, with the express purpose of meeting Andersen (20-21). A few weeks later Dickens invited Andersen to dine with the family, and when Andersen left England the next day, Dickens met him at the docks; he was the last person Andersen saw before he departed (26-7). By all accounts this first visit was a friendly one, and the two continued to correspond over the next few years. It was Dickens who, in 1856, first encouraged Andersen to return to England and to stay at his house (40). Andersen was moved by Dickens’s kindness, writing to his benefactor Jonas Collin, “as a boy I was always called Hans-Christian, but never Hans alone, and he writes, ‘Dear and worthy Hans!’ How such a beginning struck me!” (41). Based on their first meeting, their letters, and the warmth of Dickens’s introduction, Andersen surely expected to be welcomed into Dickens’s home.

Andersen mentions his struggle with English in both his letters and his diary. After his first day at Dickens’s house he wrote to Mrs. Ingeborg Drewsen, “it goes quite well with the language; I have of course to make some jumps, but we meet each other” (92). Two days later he recorded in his diary, “I talked a great deal this evening, and they understood me well” (52). After he had been in England a week, he wrote to his friend Henriette Wulff, “Him [Dickens] I understand the best as far as speaking goes, and now — exactly eight days since I came — he says that I am making surprising progress in speaking English” (94). Dickens praised Andersen’s English to his face, but his letters show something different. In early July, about two weeks after Andersen recorded Dickens’s praise, Dickens wrote that Andersen “speaks no language but his own Danish, and is suspected of not even knowing that” (112).

Engraving of Dickens at Gad’s Hill, where Andersen visited him in 1857.

In the final weeks of his stay Andersen must have picked up on Dickens’s frustration, and his family’s growing irritation. After leaving England, he wrote to Dickens from Germany: “I realize that it cannot have been at all easy for the whole circle to have in its midst for weeks such a one as spoke English as badly as I,” he told him, “Yet how little I was allowed to feel it” (118). His diary and letters, however, make clear that he had felt it. From Paris, where he traveled directly after leaving Dickens, he wrote to Wulff, “In Dickens’s house Dickens was unquestionably the pearl; Mrs. Dickens tender-hearted, Mary, I think, was the one who came closest to her in kindness to me, and thus downwards” (106). Only days after leaving England he was sharing his awareness of the Dickens family’s annoyance, and his private diary shows that awareness had been developing for weeks. After the first performance of The Frozen Deep he attended a party at the Household Words office, and closed his diary entry for the day with a parenthetical, “Not at all in good humour really the whole evening” (80). Earlier that week he had dined with Dickens’s daughter and wife, along with her sister and mother: “little Kate sarcastic, and the aunt is certainly weary of me” (78), he wrote.

Cover of Wilkie Collins’s _The Frozen Deep_: Dickens encouraged Andersen to stay longer and see him perform the led role.

Andersen stayed well beyond the two weeks he had initially intended and by July it seems he had worn out his welcome. But it was Dickens who had encouraged him to extend the visit. On June 21st, when he had been staying with the Dickens family for about ten days, Andersen wrote in his diary, “Dickens begged me most charmingly not to go before I had seen the performance they were giving for Jerrold’s widow, said that he, his wife and daughters were so glad to have me with them; I was much moved” (60). This was just the sort of kindness that appealed to Andersen, always seeking the approval of those around him. And he must have recognized the burden on the family, for a week later, June 28th, he wrote in his diary that when he was asked how long he would stay, he replied, “Long for Mr. Dickens, short for me!” (70).

One can’t help but feel for Andersen, staying with a man he clearly admired, and who had encouraged him to extend his visit. Surely he can’t be blamed for the timing of his visit: not only was Dickens mourning his friend and busy with rehearsals for The Frozen Deep, but Little Dorritt was being panned by reviewers and he was about to bid adieu to his son Walter, who shortly thereafter left for India (where he would die a few years later). Also his marriage was unraveling — he would meet Ellen Ternan a few months later, and separate from his wife within a year. Despite all this Dickens himself maintained a friendly facade, but one might forgive his family for becoming irritated with their guest.

Perhaps had Andersen declined Dickens’s invitation to stay longer, and skipped The Frozen Deep, he wouldn’t be remembered as such a “bony bore.”

In this post I describe an exercise that helps students connect words and illustrations. I used it this semester in my “Disney’s Victorians” course, and it has a historical frame that is particularly appropriate for teaching a Victorian novel (especially Dickens). But it might be useful if you’re teaching any text that combines words and images — especially one that usually privileges the words.

The idea is a simple one: students, in small groups, stage a reading of a scene that corresponds to an illustration. They choose an appropriate moment in the passage, and when they get to that moment they “realize” the illustration, posing as the characters are posed and holding the pose for 30 seconds or so.

As I explain below, the idea came from a workshop with John Glavin, who has really interesting ideas about performance as interpretation. What students get from this exercise depends a lot on how you set it up, and so below I discuss some backgrounds and practicalities before getting to the payoffs.

Background: Pedagogy and Performance

The New Royal Theatre in 1858. From Wikimedia Commons.

Last summer I participated in a National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminar, “Performing Dickens,” led by Sharon Weltman and joined by a series of distinguished visiting faculty. Tracy Davis and Carolyn Williams shared their research on melodrama and some historical contexts for Victorian theatrical adaptations. When Jacky Bratton and Gilli Bush-Bailey visited, we staged a reading of a short scene from Dickens’s The Battle of Life. We tried it several different ways, and the experience helped put into practice some of the theoretical ideas Davis and Williams had introduced.

That focus on staging and embodied performance continued with John Glavin’s visit, which totally changed things for me. Glavin is interested in performance and adaptation as pedagogical and interpretive tools, as he discusses in After Dickens. During his visit, after a series of theatrical warm-ups and voice and body exercises, we engaged in the kind of performance he envisions. We each chose a minor character from Great Expectations, and then came up with different ways of “staging” the scene of Pip’s near-drowning, as the characters from Pip’s life flash before his eyes. We lay on our backs and passed “Pip” over our hands (as in, physically moved a body over our heads) as we each recited a line spoken by our chosen character; then we stood in a circle around “Pip,” moving back and forth and changing elevations to mimic the rocking of the waves as the submerged Pip is bombarded with lines he’d heard earlier in the novel.

If you know Great Expectations well, you can probably locate the scene of Pip’s near-drowning, as he attempts to escape with Magwitch and is overtaken by Compeyson. Here is how Dickens writes the scene:

“I had had to feel my way back among the shipping” by F. A. Fraser. Illustration for Great Expectations. Via Victorian Web.

In the same moment, I saw the steersman of the galley lay his hand on his prisoner’s shoulder, and saw that both boats were swinging round with the force of the tide, and saw that all hands on board the steamer were running forward quite frantically. Still in the same moment I saw the prisoner start up, lean across his captor, and pull the cloak from the neck of the shrinking sitter in the galley. Still in the same moment, I saw that the face disclosed, was the face of the other convict of long ago. Still in the same moment, I saw the face tilt backward with a white terror on it that I shall never forget, and heard a great cry on board the steamer and a loud splash in the water, and felt the boat sink from under me.

It was but for an instant that I seemed to struggle with a thousand mill-weirs and a thousand flashes of light; that instant past, I was taken on board the galley.

Where does it say Pip’s life flashed before his eyes, you ask? Well, it doesn’t. Or at least, we need some interpretive work: the exercise, having minor characters in the novel each speak a line, is an interpretation of those “thousand flashes of light.” It’s one that gives voice to minor characters, building on Alex Woloch’s The One vs. the Many (a title Glavin credited). And that’s the point — performance is a way of interpreting the novel that differs from, and complements, discussion.

Glavin calls After Dickens “a playwright’s book” (8), and I’m providing here an admittedly oversimplified version of what he has in mind: After Dickens builds on Jerzy Grotowski’s Poor Theatre to unpack the interplay between affect and critique, and the first part of the book contextualizes Dickens’s “refusal” of the stage. But I hope I’ve convinced you — as Glavin convinced me — of a basic point: the pedagogical possibilities of performance as an avenue for textual analysis.

Background: Melodrama, Serial Fiction, and Illustration

My “Disney’s Victorians” course is about adaptation: we spent the first five weeks on Oliver Twist, looking at stage and film versions alongside the novel. By the time we got to Disney’s Oliver & Company, students had a range of other adaptations with which to compare it, and some historical contexts for thinking about those adaptations.

Playbill from May 21, 1838. From the British Library. Public domain.

Oliver Twist, of course, was published in monthly parts, in Bentley’s Miscellany. Michael Lund and Leigha McReynolds, among others, have written about the pedagogical possibilities for reading periodicals and serial fiction, and I took some advantage of the serial form to make a historical point. I assigned the novel through the May, 1838 installment, and then we read a theatrical adaptation from that month. Performed before the novel was finished, the play gave us a chance to talk about Victorian copyright law and adaptations, and Dickens’s discomfort seeing his unfinished novels on stage. As Forster writes, “in the middle of the first scene [Dickens] laid himself down in a corner of the box and never rose from it until the drop-scene fell” (152).

I also used this stage version to introduce some genre conventions, and for that I assigned portions of Carolyn Williams’s wonderful essay on “Melodrama,” from the Cambridge History of Victorian Literature. “In its most literal definition,” Williams writes, “melodrama consists of a combination of music and drama in which passages of music either alternate with passages of dramatic speech or subtend them almost continuously and in which speech and action are interrupted by moments of static pictorial composition, the tableaux” (193). The music prepared students for some later adaptations, but it was the tableaux on which we focused. In particular, I introduced them to the “realization,” the tableau that reproduces, on stage, a recognizable painting or illustration. As Martin Meisel notes, actors often “realized” the illustrations that accompanied the novel they were adapting. The theatrical adaptation of Oliver Twist in particular “capitalizes thoroughly on the vividness and familiarity of the plates” (253). By recreating these historical conventions, students link text to play to illustration, and develop a sense of how the Victorians experienced Oliver Twist.

Practicalities

The exercise is fairly self-explanatory, but as with anything, an example never hurts. I chose the book’s most famous scene, Oliver asking for more, and Cruikshank’s accompanying illustration. I asked for a few volunteers, and assigned each a character. They read the character’s dialogue (I read the narration), and posed them as they are positioned in the image. Once students had seen what they would be doing, I split them into groups and assigned passages and illustrations. I wanted to be prescriptive: rather than letting them choose a scene and illustration, I told them which paragraph to start with, and where to end. For me, it was important that they pick a precise moment to stop speaking and hold the tableau. Choosing that moment was part of the interpretation, and I wanted to give them a finite set of paragraphs to choose from.

I had assigned the Norton edition, which includes some but not all of Cruikshank’s illustrations. To make up for this, I printed out the images I assigned to each group and distributed them in class. During their “performance,” I projected the image onto the screen in class, so that the “audience” could see the illustration next to the realization, and compare.

We did this in class, as essentially a discussion activity. It takes enough time that a full class session could be devoted to it (our class meets just once a week, so this took up only a portion of our time). The paper assignment that followed asked students to write about a specific scene from Oliver Twist and an adaptation of that scene. Some students chose a Cruikshank illustration, and incorporated their conclusions from this exercise into their paper. Depending on your goals for the course, you might require students to do this, or use the activity simply to spark discussion.

I designed this exercise for Dickens, but it could certainly be used with other authors. It makes the most sense for illustrated novels, but needn’t be limited to them. When teaching classical texts, one might choose famous paintings. Historical texts might realize photographs. And for any book, students could consider book covers or movie posters that refer to particular scenes. Depending on your class, you might even take this further: a colleague suggested mixing media by having students take a picture of their realization, and even aging it with an Instagram filter.

Payoffs

As Meisel puts it, “The reading experience assumed in most of the serial fiction produced in the middle decades of the century was discontinuous … To read was to experience both picture and text” (53). The realizations exercise helps students recreate this experience, giving them a better understanding not only of Victorian theatrical convention but also the oft-ignored illustrations. It forces them to think about the act of transferring their attention from word to image.

Embodying the text also helps students consider movement and stasis, physical relationships between characters, and details in the text they might not otherwise notice. In the picture to the right, for example, Nancy and Sikes kidnap Oliver as he tries to return Mr. Brownlow’s books. Sikes is grabbing the books from Oliver’s hands, and the illustration emphasizes the crowd of people at the scene: performing it requires giving the women in that crowd a voice, highlighting the public nature of the scene that might get overshadowed by a focus on just Sikes, Nancy, and Oliver.

As the semester progressed we continued our discussion of which scenes are illustrated, and the fact that an illustrated scene is more likely to appear in later adaptations. After this exercise, students were more willing to go back and forth between the text and the image, and prepared for texts like Alice in Wonderland, which explicitly tells the reader, “look at the picture.”

Have you had students perform scenes in this manner? How do you encourage them to go back and forth between text and illustration? Do you have other ways to re-create for students a historically distant reading practice? Tell me about it!

Like most professors, I don’t usually teach during the summers. But that doesn’t mean we don’t work. In fact, since so much time during the semester is taken up with planning classes, grading papers, and meetings (with students, committees, etc.), the summer might be when the most academic work gets done — if by academic work we mean designing new courses, researching, and writing.

If you are or know an academic, you’re probably reacting like those people in Geico commercials: everybody knows that.

As it turns out, the National Humanities Center and the National Endowment for the Humanities know that too. Both offer summer seminars for faculty, and last summer I had the privilege to attend two: a Jesse Ball duPont Summer Seminar for Liberal Arts Faculty, held at the National Humanities Center and led by Laurie Langbauer, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar at the University of California, Santa Cruz, led by Sharon Weltman.

Both were immensely valuable experiences, and I’m still reaping the benefits of those weeks in North Carolina and California. The seminars changed the course of my research. I was working on my book proposal during the NHC seminar, and thanks in part to feedback from Laurie and the other seminar participants, that paid off: my book has been accepted for publication by the University of Tennessee Press. At the NEH seminar I developed what had been an undergraduate class (“Disney’s Victorians”) into an article. That article will be part of a larger project in Victorian studies and children’s literature, but also building on adaptation studies and performance theory — fields I might not even have known about if it hadn’t been for Sharon and the other NEH summer scholars. The NEH seminar culminated in Dickens Universe, a week-long event open not just to scholars but to anyone interested in Dickens. I’ve since then increased my public humanities commitments (I gave a talk at the Orlando Public Library in August and another in December, and in a couple weeks I’ll be a guest judge for a Shakespeare competition).

Two of my three classes this semester were also directly shaped by those seminars. My literature and childhood course builds on materials from the NHC seminar, and includes texts I wouldn’t have thought to include, were it not for the multimedia and childhood studies approaches I learned at that seminar. The syllabus is varied: we just transitioned from Charlotte’s Web to Sapphire’s Push (Sapphire visited campus last week as part of Rollins’s Winter with the Writers series, so my class got to hear her speak, too). I also redesigned my “Disney’s Victorians” class completely: we’re starting with two case studies, Oliver Twist and Alice in Wonderland, and looking at stage adaptations, reviews, and film clips. Then students will work on group projects for the second half of the semester, ending with research-based creative projects. All this is grounded in the adaptation theory I read at the NEH seminar.

Perhaps the greatest benefit of both seminars was meeting like-minded scholars, with whom I’ve kept contact and will be collaborating. I’ll be presenting at this year’s Dickens Universe with others from the NEH seminar, and put together a panel for the Children’s Literature Association with participants from both seminars. Less formally, but no less importantly, I made good friends with those scholars.